Newton had not previously considered all the possible applications of his own discoveries to the purposes of theological controversy. This is the limit to the novelty of suggestion which he found in Bentley's letters. Besides the few cases in which Newton points out a fallacy, there are others in which he puts a keener edge on some argument propounded by his correspondent. For instance, Bentley had submitted some reasons against “the hypothesis of deriving the frame of the world by mechanical principles from matter evenly spread through the heavens." This was one of the theories which sought to eliminate the necessity of an intelligent cause. It was, of course, radically incompatible with Newton's system. "I had considered it very little," Newton writes, "before your letters put me upon it." But then he goes on to point out how it may be turned against its authors. It involves the assumption that gravity is inherent to matter. But, if this is so, then matter could never have been evenly spread through the heavens without the intervention of a supernatural power.

Newton's letters, while they heighten our admiration for the master, also illustrate the great ability of the disciple-his strong grasp of a subject which lay beyond the sphere of his familiar studies, and his vigorous originality in the use of new acquisitions. Bentley's Boyle Lectures have a lasting worth which is independent of their scientific value as an argument. In regard to the latter, it may be observed that they bear the mark of their age in their limited conception of a natural law as distinguished from a personal agency. Thus gravitation is allowed as a natural "law" because its action is constant and uniform. But wherever there is a more and a less, wherever the operation is apparently variable, this is explained by the in

tervening will of an intelligent person; it is not conceived that the disturbing or modifying force may be another, though unknown, "law," in the sense in which that name is given to a manifestly regular sequence of cause and effect. On their literary side, the best parts of the Lectures exhibit Bentley as a born controversialist, and the worst as a born litigant. The latter character appears in an occasional tendency to hair-splitting and quibbling; the former, in his sustained power of terse and animated reasoning, in rapid thrust and alert defence, in ready command of various resources, in the avoidance of declamation while he is proving his point, and in the judicious use of eloquence to clinch it. Here, as elsewhere, he has the knack of illustrating an abstruse subject by an image from common things. He is touching (in the second Lecture) on the doctrine of Epicurus that our freedom of will is due to the declension of atoms from the perpendicular as they fall through infinite space. ""Tis as if one should say that a bowl equally poised, and thrown upon a plain and smooth bowling-green, will run necessarily and fatally in a direct motion; but if it be made with a bias, that may decline it a little from a straight line, it may acquire by that motion a liberty of will, and so run spontaneously to the jack." It may be noticed that a passage in the eighth Lecture is one of the quaintest testimonies in literature to the comparatively recent origin of a taste for the grander forms of natural scenery. Bentley supposes his adversaries to object that "the rugged and irregular surface" of the earth refutes its claim to be "a work of divine artifice." "We ought not to believe," he replies, "that the banks of the ocean are really deformed, because they have not the form of a regular bulwark; nor that the mountains are out of shape, because they are not exact pyramids or cones."

The Lectures made a deep and wide impression. Soon after they had been published, a Latin version appeared at Berlin. A Dutch version subsequently came out at Utrecht. There was one instance, indeed, of dissent from the general approval. A Yorkshire squire wrote a pamphlet, intimating that his own experience did not lead him to consider the faculties of the human soul as a decisive argument for the existence of a Deity; and, referring to Bentley's observations on this head, he remarked, "I judge he hath taken the wrong sow by the ear." In 1694 Bentley again delivered a course of Boyle Lectures-" A Defence of Christianity "but they were never printed. Manuscript copies of them are mentioned by Kippis, the editor of the Biographia Britannica (1780); but Dean Vincent, who died in 1815, is reported by Kidd as believing that they were lost.

CHAPTER III.

LEARNED CORRESPONDENCE. THE KING'S LIBRARIAN.

IN 1692-the year of his first Boyle Lecturership-an accident placed Bentley in correspondence with John George Graevius, a German who held a professorship at Utrecht, and stood in the front rank of classical-especially Latin -scholarship. When Bentley was seeking materials for an edition of Manilius, he received a box of papers from Sir Edward Sherburn, an old Cavalier who had partly translated the poet. The papers in the box, bought at Antwerp, had belonged to the Dutch scholar, Gaspar Gevärts. Amongst them was a Latin tract by Albert Rubens ("Rubenius," the author of another treatise which Graevius had previously edited. Bentley, with Sherburn's leave, sent the newly-found tract to Graevius, who published it in 1694, with a dedication to Bentley. This circumstance afterwards brought on Bentley the absurd charge of having intercepted an honour due to Sherburn.

Graevius was rejoiced to open a correspondence with the author of the Letter to Mill, which he had warmly admired. The professor's son had lately died, leaving an unpublished edition of the Greek poet Callimachus, which Graevius was now preparing to edit. He applied to Bentley for any literary aid that he could give. In reply,

Bentley undertook to collect the fragments of Callimachus, scattered up and down throughout Greek literature; remarking that he could promise to double the number printed in a recent Paris edition, and also to improve the text. In 1696 Bentley fulfilled this promise by sending to Graevius a collection of about 420 fragments; also a new recension of the poet's epigrams, with additions to their number from a fresh manuscript source, and with some notes on the hymns. The edition appeared at Utrecht in 1697, with Bentley's contributions.

In the preface Graevius shows his sense that the work done by Bentley-“that new and brilliant light of Britain "—was not merely excellent in quality, but of a new order. Such indeed it was. Since then, successive generations have laboured at collecting and sifting the fragments of the Greek poets. But in 1697 the world had no example of systematic work in this field. The first pattern of thorough treatment and the first model of critical method were furnished by Bentley's Callimachus. Hitherto the collector of fragments had aimed at little more than heaping together "the limbs of the dismembered poet." Bentley shows how these limbs, when they have been gathered, may serve, within certain limits, to reconstruct the body. Starting from a list of the poet's works, extant or known by title, he aims at arranging the fragments under those works to which they severally belonged. But, while he concentrates his critical resources in a methodical manner, he wisely refrains from pushing conjecture too far. His Callimachus is hardly more dis\tinguished by brilliancy than by cautious judgment—praise which could not be given to all his later works. Here, as in the Letter to Mill, we see his metrical studies bearing fruit: thus he points out a fact which had hitherto es